Lego man crash lands in Newark’s Saint Gobain Formula after voyage from Gobowen Primary School, Oswestry, Shropshire

A Lego man has been on an out-of-this-world adventure and crash-landed in Newark — after setting off from a primary school over 100 miles away.

Gobowen Primary School, near Oswestry in Shropshire, had decided to launch a weather balloon after one of their pupils was inspired by a similar project he had seen on YouTube.

Year Four class teacher Margaret Cameron managed to put a successful bid in to the school’s leadership team and submit all the appropriate planning and regulations in place, including to Shropshire County Council and the Aviation Authority, and order the necessary equipment from Strato Flights, a German company which specialises in such equipment.

After two attempts to launch — caused by paper work not being authorised in time and bad weather — the weather balloon and accompanying pilot Dan the Lego man, were successfully launched from the school’s playing field on June 18 at 11am.

Its predicted flight path suggested that with the amount of helium in the tank, Dan, the balloon and its attached camera and GPS system, would reach around 28,000ft and land at around 2.30pm in Derby — but all did not go according to plan.

Mrs Cameron said: “It was a beautiful day and the children were so excited, and the balloon went up successfully.

“But the tracking device failed and when we went to Derby to where we thought it would land we couldn’t find it anywhere — it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

“We went back to school empty-handed, feeling quite deflated.”

But then, to everyone’s surprise, the next day the camera and feed came back online. The footage showed the balloon, and Dan, coming back down to earth after the balloon burst and, after a bumpy descent where the burst balloon acted as a parachute, land in a quarry — which turned out to be Saint Gobain in Newark.

Mrs Cameron contacted the site manager at the quarry and made the 120-mile trip to Bowbridge Road to collect the balloon.

The team at Saint Gobain gladly returned Dan to his owners so he could go home to Shropshire.

The amazing footage of Dan’s journey not only shows him soaring above the clouds, but leaving the earth’s orbit and even glimpses of him floating in space.

The data received showed that the weather balloon had hit temperatures of just -54°c, and had gone up to more than 70,000ft — nearly three times what was predicted — due to the extremely high helium content in the gas.

Mrs Cameron added: “It was a marvellous project and the children were so engaged, they really learned a lot and were really inspired — they now want to launch a rocket into space!

“It’s really provoked their thinking and it’s been an amazing project from start to finish.”